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Monthly Archives: March 2012

which is somewhat alike to finding out they are fundamentalist Christians who believe in creation.

‘Well’ they say ‘its all a scam’, ‘What’ I say ‘how about the science?’ to which the reply becomes vague and unspecific. It is all about making money or some government conspiracy but when pressed the answers dry up. It’s an awkward feeling, and rather like a close friend revealing that they collect Nazis war memorabilia. Despite the number of friends with doubts only one is an ardent sceptic and they are also vocal about the truth of 9/11. Hit the internet and sceptics abound with the free press slowly catching up.

The Mail and the Telegraph get into a whirl of misinformation about Climate Change along with Europe, Health and Safety and of course moral decline, they bang the cage and the monkeys go bonkers, I enjoy the blogs, I wouldn’t form opinions based on them but they make educational reading. Peter Hitchens and Mel Philips only make passing nods of recognition to the Climate Sceptics being far more concerned about political correctness gone mad, the real deniers are Christopher Booker and James Delingpole. Booker is completely deranged believing in creationism and the harmless nature of asbestos , Delingpole is perhaps more cynical and sees his alliance to the deniers exposing the climate change hoax as a means to get noticed and build a following.

It amazes me just how those little details like facts just don’t seem to have any impact on ‘sceptics’ . Climategate or rather we made stuff up gate is an example where if you offer the context of a line from the email it loses any wrong doing yet the same old lines are peddled as proof that climate change is a rather elaborate hoax. ‘”The fact is, we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it’s a travesty that we can’t.” becomes “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate”.

I wandered into the denialshere of blogs, thinktanks and sceptic comment to find out what it was about. For one it is very male, aggressive, slightly paranoid and conservative, it is an upside-down world where they seem to think that getting in with the first insults like calling science a religion based on faith makes them right. The demonising of Michael Mann of the climategate emails and who was the first to build a 1000 year record of Earth temperature is disturbing. There is the odd belief that the entire science of climate change rests on the work of his paper dubbed the hockey stick rather than the, now, thousands of peer-reviewed papers and basic science. If only they could just bring this one man down surely the whole hoax would collapse and we could resume to a world of cheap abundant energy.

However the sceptics do have a few scientists on their side and even peer-reviewed papers so in the interest of real sceptical balance I read some. Professor Geoffrey G. Duffy, in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, said “Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will.” Duffy isn’t a climate scientist but lets not be fussy, he tends to write articles rather than peer-reviewed papers, but lets get too nit-picky. He believes the world is actually cooling and that CO2 stops working as a greenhouse gas after it passes a certain concentration. The cooling, and the previous decades of warming are caused by the sun or rather the intensity of sun spots which occur over an eleven year period, the sun has gone rather quiet and he presumes- or rather predicts, that the coming solar cycles will have few sun spots and therefore 1% less radiation. Less radiate= less global warming, if it wasn’t for the CO2 we would be heading for a little ice age and the Thames would freeze. Prof Geoff Duffy presented these facts in his paper Climate Change- The Real Causes, however he is not big on citing his references, but with a little research I found this where Stephen Wilde F.R.Met.S. a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society since 1968 complains [read the comments] that Duffy has lifted his article Global Warming and Cooling – The Reality, otherwise known as plagiarism. Stephen Wilde is not a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society, [it appears he joined as a weather enthusiast- one of thousands who man weather stations] and you can check the Societies website, he is a property solicitor and member of a thinktank [opposed to Climate Change legislation]. But he does provide references to the remarkable claim that we are heading for a mini ice-age- he cites, as a main source, David Archibald, who according to another think[climate change sceptic] tank is a Perth, Australia-based scientist operating in the fields of cancer research, oil exploration and climate science.

David Archibald has a Geology BA [so technically a scientist] and Geologist with Summa Development Limited. His cancer cure turns out to be based on herbs and spices and similar to the Generals secret KFC recipe. He takes a similar line to the previous scientists in that the sun is responsible and “There are no deleterious consequences of higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are wholly beneficial,” … “Anthropogenic Global Warming is so minuscule that the effect cannot be measured from year to year, and even from generation to generation” He actually published a peer reviewed paper on his findings, well sort of. “Solar Cycles 24 and 25 and Predicted Climate Response” in Energy and Environment in 2006 , considered to be the worst paper in scientific history [link] uses a few temperature locations and in one case just one that just happen to correlate to solar variance and then uses this as proof that the world is cooling. Energy and Environment Journal is supposedly a peer reviewed science journal yet is not rated internationally and the publication of choice for sceptics who can’t find a proper journal to publish their work. see here.

Archibald does at least try to pretend to write a real paper [all 8 pages of it] with references, although the main contributor is Archibald, he finds some real papers such as Brunetti, {M. 2003, Solar signals in instrumental historical series of meteorological parameters} yet if you read that paper [its on line] the conclusions states clearly that sun spot activity does not make any real difference to global warming. But 2006 was an age ago so the same paper is updated and reworked as Solar 24-Implications for the US, then Warming or Cooling and Solar 24-Implications and Expectations and each time heralded in blogs, newspapers and Fox news as proof that there is no global warming.

Sceptic science is just recycled nonsense theories that get dreamt up and then passed around between the sceptics. And there is nothing new in this. Duffy’s other theory is that CO2 stops functioning as a greenhouse gas once saturation has been reached but this is as old as the idea of global warming and gets recycled once a year as proof that it isn’t happening. Around 1900 Svante Arrhenius published his argument that our use of fossil fuels would eventually cause global warming, another scientist, Knut Ångström, asked an assistant, Herr J. Koch, to do a simple experiment of sending infrared radiation through a tube filled with carbon dioxide, and at that time the tube appeared to reach a saturation level of CO2 where there was no more heating. Knut Ångström was quick to warn geologists of all people not to listen to Arrhenius wild theories of global warming.